Op-Ed

Making Sense of the News From Israel and Palestine

By PEGGY RAY

The recent news reports from Israel and Palestine have been depressingly familiar: a Palestinian suicide bomber strikes. Israeli soldiers take over a West Bank town. Palestinians send rockets into Israel. Israel responds by destroying seven alleged weapons factories with helicopter gunships and amasses troops at the border for an invasion.

There those Palestinians go, again, we are led to think. Who can figure suicide bombers and who are these crazed extremists? Why can’t Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas keep his people under control?

One reason events in Israel and Palestine seem so bewildering is that the news we get is usually limited to that from official Israeli sources. Take the latest suicide bombing in Natanya, for example, where four innocent Israelis were killed. This was the first suicide bombing since late February, we are told, so Israelis enjoyed five months of “peace” during a ceasefire.

Our news media never reported, though, what was happening on the West Bank and in Gaza in that same five-month “ceasefire.” According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, 43 Palestinians were killed by Israelis and 399 injuries were reported. Fifty-six of the injured were hit with live ammunition, 135 with rubber-coated or plastic bullets. Ninety-two were hurt by tear gas and 116 received miscellaneous injuries. We can assume a lot more injuries were taken care of outside of the medical establishment.

In a recent trip to Israel and the West Bank, I learned about Palestinian efforts to mount non-violent resistance against their conditions under the Israeli occupation. Since I got back, I have been following (at www.stopthewall.org ) a story of non-violent resistance at a village called Bil’in as one example. As far as I can tell, nobody has been killed there, but there have been plenty of injuries.

Israelis have begun building the Separation Wall in Bil’in. Many residents there made their living as construction workers in Israel until the intifada that began in September 2000. When that led to their being barred from entry into Israel, they turned to agriculture to make their living. Now that means of survival is being threatened as their olive trees are being uprooted and the projected route of the Wall will cut them off from significant portions of their lands. Moreover, according to the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem, that land is to be used for the creation of a new Israeli settlement and expansion of existing ones, right in their faces.

There have been stones thrown at Bil’in, where protests have been going on since April, but not until Israeli soldiers beat people with clubs and fired tear gas, rubber-coated metal bullets, sound grenades and launched a new weapon called “the screamer” which emits a terrifying noise. Non-violent activists at Bil’in and elsewhere have tried to discourage their young men from throwing stones in response to military violence, but have not yet been totally successful. Nevertheless, the courage of so many in confronting Israeli bulldozers and their military support has been remarkable.

And one day there was a small, if perhaps temporary, victory. Several hundred villagers, along with their Israeli and international supporters, approached the land where six bulldozers were uprooting trees and clearing a path to build the Wall. They dismantled a barbed-wire roadblock preventing their progress, then were beaten back and met with tear gas and rubber bullets. Later, they returned and dismantled the foundations of the Wall that had previously been built.

We cannot rely only on Israeli government sources for our information. We need to know how the situation looks from the Palestinian point of view as well if we are to make intelligent judgments about our government’s role in that sad conflict.

Peggy Ray, a member of Bronx Action for Justice and Peace and a board member of Center of International Learning, traveled in Israel and Palestine with a Fellowship of Reconciliation Peace-Builders delegation last month.
 

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